Saw II Hands-on Preview

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For better or worse, Jigsaw returns to torture us.

By Anthony Gallegos

Whether you liked the original Saw game like IGN's David Clayman, or you were disappointed with it like I was, Saw II is coming. While it's been scarcely six months since the original was released, Konami's determined to give fans of the franchise more of Jigsaw's diabolical world to explore. The biggest questions I had going into the brief demo I played, though? Would the developer work out the flaws of the original, creating an experience that is actually horrific and, more importantly, fun?

Honestly, I don't feel I can answer that with any certainty at this point. The demo only lasted about 20 minutes (a large portion of which was spent trying to bumble through overly difficult puzzles), and showed only glimpses of the changes the sequel is implementing with combat and puzzles. Largely the game is still very similar to the original at this point, with the return of various booby traps like doors that require you to quickly press a button to avoid a trap on the other side, and beams that you'll have to balance on in order to cross safely. Even with the game's new environments and characters, anyone who played the original game could easily hop into the sequel and immediately know what to expect out of the areas they're in: filing cabinets are planted around with objects to grab, glass is broken on the floor, and walls have very specific holes in them that your character is funneled into. I know it was a demo that I was supposed to get through in a timely fashion, but so far the game seems every bit as linear as the no-exploration-required original -- something I hope the game as a whole will address by giving the player more options when they're in the environment.

The big traps that the film/game villain Jigsaw is known for -- and what I thought were the better parts of the original -- sadly made next to no appearance in the demo. The character I played as started off in a head vice and was forced to use a scalpel to cut the key out of his own face, but this was all done through a fairly obvious series of button presses and analog stick movements, requiring next to no brains. I guess this is cool if you're in it for the spectacle or watching a guy cut on his own face, but what I want to see are the elaborate puzzles that the player will encounter later in the game. Concept art was shown during the pre-demo presentation, but it's all speculation as to how these puzzles will play out. Hopefully they won't be as brutal as the first game, and will reward clever, fast-thinking players rather than those who can tolerate dying over and over until they figure it out, as was so often the case in the original.

I don't mean to make it sound like every portion of the demo was exactly the same as something from the original, but I wouldn't say that anything stood out as particularly innovative either. While there were certainly new environmental puzzles, several of them amounted to minor twists on the original. For instance in the first game you had to do several puzzles that required you to rotate sections of wire around to connect circuits, and in Saw II you do the exact same thing only this time the wires can only be matched to wires of opposite color (red to yellow and vice-a-versa). I think it's a great idea that the team at Zombie isn't just throwing in the same exact puzzles from the original, but I certainly hope that the minor puzzles later on manage to mix it up a little more than what's been shown so far. And sadly, even the one environmental puzzle I encountered during the demo that was unique -- wherein the player had to find a code by turning his flashlight on and off in order to find glow-in-the-dark numbers on the ground -- was designed in such a way that no person seemed to be able to figure it out without assistance from the staff on site.

The combat was something I found completely unsatisfactory in the original, and Zombie has said that they wanted to address this issue with the sequel, but so far I've only gotten to see the new puzzle-style combat in Saw II. Instead of fighting the enemy that attacked -- who had his arms bound and a spiked steel cage around his head with which he charged me with -- I had to figure out a way to use his momentum and the environment to kill him. Without explicitly saying how I did it, I'll just say that it was indeed more satisfying than almost any other combat in the original game -- and is more in line with the use-your-head-to-live theme of the serial killer Jigsaw -- but I'm still left wondering what combat will be like outside of the instances where they challenge your mind rather than your muscle. Here's to hoping they've come up with a better combat system than the stuff I slogged through the first time around.

While I don't feel any final judgements can be made about Saw II (it is, after all, the first time anyone has got to see it), so far it looks like a game that appeals mainly to fans of the original. However, should the combat come together as stated, and the major puzzles be even more clever than they were the first go-around, then maybe, just maybe, I could be convinced to play another game with Jigsaw.